Shira Wilkof | Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (original) (raw)
Uploads
Papers by Shira Wilkof
Planning Perspectives , 2023
One of the most volatile sites in Jerusalem is the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, at the hea... more One of the most volatile sites in Jerusalem is the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, at the heart of which lies the City of David archeological site. Much scholarship focuses on the contemporary tensions that arise from its two contradictory identities: an East Jerusalem Palestinian residential community and a Jewish symbol of a mythical past. This article, by contrast, explores a largely overlooked historical moment that has been key to the shaping of these dynamics: the declaration within merely six weeks after the 1967 war of an Israeli national park around the Old City Walls. The article explores how an unrealized British colonial plan for a green belt around the historic walls of Jerusalem was updated in 1967 by Israeli landscape architects using cutting-edge North American environmentalist ideas. Their blueprint, we argue, was crucial to the shaping of the ‘holy basin’s’ spatial logic, landscape imaginaries, and legal structures, necessary to understand the current turn of events. In this process, we highlight the centrality of incorporating longer-term perspectives in the study of contemporary urban realities, bringing into closer dialogue scholarship on present-day urbanism with historical studies of planning and cities.
![Research paper thumbnail of [PREPRINT] The Sharon Plan reconsidered: how Eliezer Brutzkus' pre-1948 separatism shaped Israel's New Towns](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/87995058/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Planning Perspctives , 2022
This article focuses on the Sharon Plan, Israel's celebrated New Towns programme and a central et... more This article focuses on the Sharon Plan, Israel's celebrated New Towns programme and a central ethos of early statehood. Conventional wisdom unequivocally identifies it with the renowned Bauhaus-graduate Arieh Sharon and the progressive spirit of architectural modernism. I reveal, by contrast, how the plan drew on an obscure blueprint devised by an urban planner, Eliezer Brutzkus, in the context of the Peel Partition Plan in 1937. The Peel Partition Plan proposed, for the first time, to divide Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, based on population transfer. Brutzkus reacted to the new horizon of a Jewish-only statehood by devising protonational mass urbanization plan, based on the 'comprehensive planning' of a land emptied of its Arab majority. In 1948, this plan was updated and canonized as the Sharon Plan. This previously unexplored thread re-situates Sharon's modernist feat within the longer-term history of Zionist colonization and its 'messy realities'. Further, Brutzkus drew on geoeconomic and demographic planning policy tools, rather than on architecture and design. As such, this case demonstrates the importance of attending to disciplinary multiplicity as a vital part of the period's legacy, rather than collapsing it under the blanket term of architectural modernism.
Planning Perspectives (May 2019), 2019
The article explores mid-twentieth century professional transnationalism by highlighting the cruc... more The article explores mid-twentieth century professional transnationalism by highlighting the crucial role of lesser-known planners – ‘ordinary modernists’ – in disseminating, negotiating, and ultimately shaping the modern built environment. It focuses on the work of Ariel Kahane (1907-1986), a mostly unknown German-Jewish senior planning officer under both the British Mandate and on the Israeli ‘New Towns’ team of early statehood. It examines Kahane’s critique of British imperial planning’s betrayal of the emancipatory values of large-scale planning, and shows how, while drawing on planning innovations from the British metropole, he produced his own, self-contradictory, planning vision. Kahane’s planning ideas advanced notions of Jewish exclusiveness, an orientation expressed ever more explicitly after 1948, when he became a high-ranking planning officer in Israel. His work as a senior state planner illuminates aspects of continuity across the divide of 1948, which is typically viewed as a moment of rupture with respect to Israeli state planning and the formation of ethno-spatial structures.
Jahrbuch des Simon Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook , 2018
This article explores the collection of the planner-architect Ariel (Anselm) Kahane (1907–1986) h... more This article explores the collection of the planner-architect Ariel (Anselm) Kahane (1907–1986) held at the Hebrew University Central Archive, as a ‘deliberate site’ of utopian intention. Despite
his high-ranking positions both within the British-colonial and Israeli planning systems, Kahane has remained under the scholarly and professional radar, his work almost entirely forgotten.
Against this background, the article argues that the story of the making of the archive (the trajectory of formation, organization and preservation) is linked to its utopian content, and that both of these aspects are rooted in Kahane’s cultural position as a Jecke, a German-trained planner operating within the context of Zionist nation-building. The article provides a first attempt at exploring this virtually unknown planner’s work and assessing his contribution to the field. It traces his attempts to draw attention to his utopian blueprints drawn throughout his five-decade career: from his virtually unknown planning exhibition in Jerusalem in 1945 — arguably the first one held in Jewish Palestine, to his unrealized New Town of Oshrat as a state planner in the 1950s, and through his international activity as a UN expert in Turkey in the 1960s. Characterized by the import, adaptation and later export of distinct professional knowledge, Kahane’s lifework serves as a powerful platform to explore the encounter between German-Jewish intellectual migration, Zionist nation-building and transnational circulation of knowledge and expertise.
Planting New Towns in Europe in the Interwar Years: Experiments and Dreams for Future Societies, ed. Helen Meller and Heleni Forfyriou (Cambridge Scholars Press), 2016
Book Reviews by Shira Wilkof
![Research paper thumbnail of The Pillbox as a Parable? Transnational Perspectives in writing on Israeli Place-Making [PREPRINT]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/65651580/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel History, Society, Culture , 2021
Talks by Shira Wilkof
A public lecture delivered at the Summer Series of the Bat Yam Center for Urbanism, August 2015 (... more A public lecture delivered at the Summer Series of the Bat Yam Center for Urbanism, August 2015 (Hebrew)
Thesis Chapters by Shira Wilkof
This study provides a first history of the emergence of urban and national planning in Jewish Pal... more This study provides a first history of the emergence of urban and national planning in Jewish Palestine/Israel (1933-1953), placing it in the wider context of the international planning movement and the flow of knowledge, ideas and expertise within it. I do so by critically excavating the individual work of three German-émigré planners during the British Mandate period, all of whom later became senior state planners in early statehood: Eliezer Leonid Brutzkus (1907-1987), Ariel Anselm Kahane (1907-1986), and Artur Glikson (1911-1966). Their planning work, which has mostly escaped the scholars' radar, embodies a unique encounter between German cultural sensibilities and professional traditions, British colonial practices and the Zionist ideology. Operating at a time of global turmoil, each produced a distinct imagination for national " Urban Arcadias " , grounded in the local settler enterprise, yet enthusiastically participating in the universal quest for a new social order. Essentially a work of planning history, this project also combines the perspectives of social history, history of the built-environment disciplines and Middle East studies. It takes as its point of departure underexplored aspects of planning, a distinct policy expertise that originated in fin-de-siècle industrial Europe and which evolved in the first half of the twentieth-century from a voluntarist, urban field to an influential public policy expertise concerned with large-scale planning. It highlights crucial, yet largely neglected, questions regarding spatial policy, including national and regional land use, town-country relations, settlement structure, demography and economy, and their encounter with emergent ideas on state interventionism and technocracy. Following an introductory chapter, which considers historiographical and theoretical aspects, a separate chapter is devoted to the work of each of the three planners during the British Mandate period. It progresses chronologically from Brutzkus' introduction of functional-economic planning in the late 1930's, to Kahane's formalistic-aesthetic techno-utopian proposals for postwar reconstruction, and then moving on to Glikson's environmentalist approach, which
Planning Perspectives , 2023
One of the most volatile sites in Jerusalem is the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, at the hea... more One of the most volatile sites in Jerusalem is the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, at the heart of which lies the City of David archeological site. Much scholarship focuses on the contemporary tensions that arise from its two contradictory identities: an East Jerusalem Palestinian residential community and a Jewish symbol of a mythical past. This article, by contrast, explores a largely overlooked historical moment that has been key to the shaping of these dynamics: the declaration within merely six weeks after the 1967 war of an Israeli national park around the Old City Walls. The article explores how an unrealized British colonial plan for a green belt around the historic walls of Jerusalem was updated in 1967 by Israeli landscape architects using cutting-edge North American environmentalist ideas. Their blueprint, we argue, was crucial to the shaping of the ‘holy basin’s’ spatial logic, landscape imaginaries, and legal structures, necessary to understand the current turn of events. In this process, we highlight the centrality of incorporating longer-term perspectives in the study of contemporary urban realities, bringing into closer dialogue scholarship on present-day urbanism with historical studies of planning and cities.
Planning Perspctives , 2022
This article focuses on the Sharon Plan, Israel's celebrated New Towns programme and a central et... more This article focuses on the Sharon Plan, Israel's celebrated New Towns programme and a central ethos of early statehood. Conventional wisdom unequivocally identifies it with the renowned Bauhaus-graduate Arieh Sharon and the progressive spirit of architectural modernism. I reveal, by contrast, how the plan drew on an obscure blueprint devised by an urban planner, Eliezer Brutzkus, in the context of the Peel Partition Plan in 1937. The Peel Partition Plan proposed, for the first time, to divide Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, based on population transfer. Brutzkus reacted to the new horizon of a Jewish-only statehood by devising protonational mass urbanization plan, based on the 'comprehensive planning' of a land emptied of its Arab majority. In 1948, this plan was updated and canonized as the Sharon Plan. This previously unexplored thread re-situates Sharon's modernist feat within the longer-term history of Zionist colonization and its 'messy realities'. Further, Brutzkus drew on geoeconomic and demographic planning policy tools, rather than on architecture and design. As such, this case demonstrates the importance of attending to disciplinary multiplicity as a vital part of the period's legacy, rather than collapsing it under the blanket term of architectural modernism.
Planning Perspectives (May 2019), 2019
The article explores mid-twentieth century professional transnationalism by highlighting the cruc... more The article explores mid-twentieth century professional transnationalism by highlighting the crucial role of lesser-known planners – ‘ordinary modernists’ – in disseminating, negotiating, and ultimately shaping the modern built environment. It focuses on the work of Ariel Kahane (1907-1986), a mostly unknown German-Jewish senior planning officer under both the British Mandate and on the Israeli ‘New Towns’ team of early statehood. It examines Kahane’s critique of British imperial planning’s betrayal of the emancipatory values of large-scale planning, and shows how, while drawing on planning innovations from the British metropole, he produced his own, self-contradictory, planning vision. Kahane’s planning ideas advanced notions of Jewish exclusiveness, an orientation expressed ever more explicitly after 1948, when he became a high-ranking planning officer in Israel. His work as a senior state planner illuminates aspects of continuity across the divide of 1948, which is typically viewed as a moment of rupture with respect to Israeli state planning and the formation of ethno-spatial structures.
Jahrbuch des Simon Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook , 2018
This article explores the collection of the planner-architect Ariel (Anselm) Kahane (1907–1986) h... more This article explores the collection of the planner-architect Ariel (Anselm) Kahane (1907–1986) held at the Hebrew University Central Archive, as a ‘deliberate site’ of utopian intention. Despite
his high-ranking positions both within the British-colonial and Israeli planning systems, Kahane has remained under the scholarly and professional radar, his work almost entirely forgotten.
Against this background, the article argues that the story of the making of the archive (the trajectory of formation, organization and preservation) is linked to its utopian content, and that both of these aspects are rooted in Kahane’s cultural position as a Jecke, a German-trained planner operating within the context of Zionist nation-building. The article provides a first attempt at exploring this virtually unknown planner’s work and assessing his contribution to the field. It traces his attempts to draw attention to his utopian blueprints drawn throughout his five-decade career: from his virtually unknown planning exhibition in Jerusalem in 1945 — arguably the first one held in Jewish Palestine, to his unrealized New Town of Oshrat as a state planner in the 1950s, and through his international activity as a UN expert in Turkey in the 1960s. Characterized by the import, adaptation and later export of distinct professional knowledge, Kahane’s lifework serves as a powerful platform to explore the encounter between German-Jewish intellectual migration, Zionist nation-building and transnational circulation of knowledge and expertise.
Planting New Towns in Europe in the Interwar Years: Experiments and Dreams for Future Societies, ed. Helen Meller and Heleni Forfyriou (Cambridge Scholars Press), 2016
Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel History, Society, Culture , 2021
A public lecture delivered at the Summer Series of the Bat Yam Center for Urbanism, August 2015 (... more A public lecture delivered at the Summer Series of the Bat Yam Center for Urbanism, August 2015 (Hebrew)
This study provides a first history of the emergence of urban and national planning in Jewish Pal... more This study provides a first history of the emergence of urban and national planning in Jewish Palestine/Israel (1933-1953), placing it in the wider context of the international planning movement and the flow of knowledge, ideas and expertise within it. I do so by critically excavating the individual work of three German-émigré planners during the British Mandate period, all of whom later became senior state planners in early statehood: Eliezer Leonid Brutzkus (1907-1987), Ariel Anselm Kahane (1907-1986), and Artur Glikson (1911-1966). Their planning work, which has mostly escaped the scholars' radar, embodies a unique encounter between German cultural sensibilities and professional traditions, British colonial practices and the Zionist ideology. Operating at a time of global turmoil, each produced a distinct imagination for national " Urban Arcadias " , grounded in the local settler enterprise, yet enthusiastically participating in the universal quest for a new social order. Essentially a work of planning history, this project also combines the perspectives of social history, history of the built-environment disciplines and Middle East studies. It takes as its point of departure underexplored aspects of planning, a distinct policy expertise that originated in fin-de-siècle industrial Europe and which evolved in the first half of the twentieth-century from a voluntarist, urban field to an influential public policy expertise concerned with large-scale planning. It highlights crucial, yet largely neglected, questions regarding spatial policy, including national and regional land use, town-country relations, settlement structure, demography and economy, and their encounter with emergent ideas on state interventionism and technocracy. Following an introductory chapter, which considers historiographical and theoretical aspects, a separate chapter is devoted to the work of each of the three planners during the British Mandate period. It progresses chronologically from Brutzkus' introduction of functional-economic planning in the late 1930's, to Kahane's formalistic-aesthetic techno-utopian proposals for postwar reconstruction, and then moving on to Glikson's environmentalist approach, which